On a high-definition screen overhead, Chicago police surveillance video from a tough West Side street corner played in real time. At desks below, federal and local investigators combed through digital maps showing where violent crimes occur and where the guns involved came from.

Exactly what kind of whack jobs you got working in law enforcement up there. Trying to vilify the III%ers?!? You are so far out there that you have absolutely no clue what you are trying to do. No wait, never mind, I forgot this is the home of obumer...

The alcove in the Chicago office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been turned into a regional gun crime hub, a place where officials from several agencies said Thursday that they hope to work together more closely to accelerate investigations and link crimes to one another.

“The most important thing is the timeliness in which gun violence can be stopped,” Alfonza Wysinger, first deputy superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, told reporters Thursday. “This center will be an invaluable asset in identifying, investigating and prosecuting the trigger pullers that are on the streets of Chicago today.”

Federal and local agencies have long shared information, but officials said the Chicago Crime Gun Intelligence Center represents a greater level of collaboration and promises to piece together disparate data points to solve past shootings and stop future ones.

“The investigative and intelligence analysis that needs to be done…it is very time consuming and very labor-intensive,” said Carl Vasilko, the special agent in charge of the ATF’s Chicago office. “That, frankly, is not where we’ve done a very good job in the past. We get the hits, we link the crimes, but we don’t have the resources and the analysts to devote to the tedious work of trying to piece these puzzles together.”

The new center should help that, Vasilko said. The work being done there will be an extension of longstanding ATF efforts but with greater interaction between agencies, he said. Chicago police have joined the project, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has pledged its help. More than a dozen other agencies — federal, county, municipal, Illinois and Indiana — are also helping out.

Vasilko said porous state lines allow guns that might be connected to multiple crimes to flow into Chicago. By sharing databases and expertise on a regional and national basis, he said, authorities should be able to solve more crimes.

The Chicago ATF office began overseeing operations in northern Indiana this year, a move that Vasilko said made sense since about 20 percent of guns recovered from Chicago crimes can be traced back to Indiana.

“The reality is these guys, these shooters … move freely across the borders,” said David Capp, the U.S. attorney for northern Indiana. “They commit crimes in Indiana, they come back to Chicago, they commit crimes up here.”

Wysinger said the center could have a real impact on Chicago crime.

“By combining all of these law enforcement databases,” he said, “we will greatly reduce the time it takes to get evidence back into the hands of our investigators.”